

Drawings feel as though they can be erased. Sketches can be constructed with little knowledge of design tooling or shortcut commands. “We’re really trying to keep true to this being a blank whiteboard and make it feel like it is this hand-drawn, tangible place that creativity happens.”įreehand tries to mimic that lo-fi, low-pressure creation mode, Kiely told me. You could quickly sketch out an idea, and you could throw it all away and go back to the drawing board.” That’s very tangible but also very disposable. “Before these digital tools,” Kiely said, “these sorts of meetings would happen by sketching on a napkin, or drawing on a piece of paper, or something. The approachability of the interface, and its preference for speed of expression to the perfection of visual ideas, is rooted in two of InVision’s core design principles, according to Kiely: first, that “power is not visible, it is felt,” and second, that design should “be inclusive, not selective.” This minimalist approach is intentional, Kiely said: “We’re really trying to keep true to this being a blank whiteboard and make it feel like it is this hand-drawn, tangible place that creativity happens.” Open Freehand and you’ll find an almost entirely blank page, with minimal tooling on the left-hand side of the display anchoring an otherwise unobstructed workspace. Photo: InVision InVision’s Freehand Recreates That Napkin-Sketch Feeling
#Mural vs miro software#
More UX and Product Design Tools What Is User Story Mapping, and How Is Story Map Software Used? They took us on a tour of their respective platforms, with an eye for how visual displays, navigation features and facilitator controls reflect distinct design philosophies and customer profiles. But it’s also used a lot by HR teams and customer experience teams,” she said.įor a backstage look at the user experience of the three platforms, Built In spoke with Kiely, Latour and Olivieri.

Miro is kind of this horizontal tool, right? We see product managers use it for task tracking or to connect with developers for Jira tasks and issues. “Designers were really our early adopters,” Latour said. “But right now, I think that is shifting. “ The loss of a physical office equates to the loss of one centerpiece for group meetings, planning sessions and brainstorms.”Īs members of different departments, customers and consultants come together to strategize and jointly develop products and services, digital whiteboards serve as a common meeting space - a destination for hosting agile rituals and brainstorming sessions collating research findings and conducting diagramming exercises, retrospectives and design sprints. “ The loss of a physical office equates to the loss of one centerpiece for group meetings, planning sessions and brainstorms,” Latour said.īut the trend also reflects high rates of adoption by enterprise-level firms who are shifting to flatter, more web-like organizational structures as they undergo digital transformation, said Celeste Olivieri, head of product design at MURAL. The need for new ways to collaborate amid the COVID-19 pandemic is undoubtedly one factor contributing to the explosive growth of these tools. The collaborative whiteboard Miro - which two weeks ago launched its Live Embed API, allowing Microsoft Teams, Airtable, Atlassian and Notion users to bring Miro boards directly into their core user experiences - has a user base of six million people, with nearly one million active users weekly, according to Iris Latour, a customer insights lead at Miro.


San Francisco-based MURAL reports that its visual collaboration workspace is used by 43 percent of Fortune Global 100 enterprises with, in some cases, up to 72,000 active members per month in a single firm.īilly Kiely, VP of product design at InVision, said that its digital product design and development platform is used by all Fortune 100 companies and has seven million users around the world InVision’s new virtual whiteboard tool, Freehand, has seen 130 percent growth in weekly active users since March.
